Yay, F4! Great key, thx.
Speaking as a real Ubuntu newbie (and not too long linux user in general) I can tell you, you dont need to know those commands right from the start.
Distros like Ubuntu, Suse and so on work out of the box with a windows-like gui and if you use them like they are provided, you dont need to do any command line stuff at all. In fact an XP installation is way more complicated with all the custom tools and settings you need to do until you get a useable OS.
Distros come with tools for almost everything already installed and if you need something else, there are tools (clickable
) that give you lists of more things you can install by just clicking on the list entry. Much easier than aquiring new software in windows.
The only thing that really confused me when first installing a linux was the way it handles pathes and hd names.
In windows you have your HDs and every HD has its own top level folder (C:, D:, E: and so on). You reach any data by chosing a HD first and click through the folders from there on.
In Linux the folder system is not linked like that to your hardware/HD structure.
There is only one top level folder called root (thats a hint on the tree-like folder structure I guess
). Root has no obvious real place on your hardware, its kind of abstract. From there on the OS implements its folder structure. Somewhere there might be a folder that
contains your windows HDs...
As you can see I still struggle hard to describe this system, for a windows user its really odd.
Oh and HDs (the real hardware parts) are given complicated names like sda0, sda1, or even sda01..2...4 and so on for partitions on sata hds. You might need these names if you want to customize the way linux makes partitions when installing. But I recommend you just accept the partitions it will propose for your first try.